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One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

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Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#131

Post by smcl »

px43 wrote: post #113
smcl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a snarky YouTuber doing the “this one time at bandcamp” voice is the best argument, I dunno what to tell you. To borrow his condescending tone, he is making the argument “you think line go down, but line go up!” the latter half of which is the title of Dan Olsen’s high-profile video of the cryptocurrency boom. Unless it becomes practical to pay for something with cryptocurrencies (which for me should be the primar…

For millions of people, crypto-currencies are the most convenient way to buy lots of things. I've been buying things regularly with cryptocurrencies since 2011. Domain names, video games, hosting, consumer electronics, clothing, airfare, etc. 2017 marked a pivotal point where Bitcoin specifically abandoned catering to the brick and mortar and e-commerce use cases, and started focusing on large scale financial service…

Well that's kind of a bad comparison, since Yen isn't my local currency and yet it has been useful to me when I was visiting Japan. I could buy it for a reasonable price in my current country, in basically any airport or bureau de change around the world. I could easily withdraw Yen from an ATM when in Japan, could buy things anywhere in the country with Yen and then switch back the couple-thousand I couldn't spend at Duty Free when I returned home.

Hearing that crypto may not be for me is quite surprising. It is advertised to me all over the place and the various stereotypical "cryptobros" seem curiously keen on people like me buying into the ecosystem, and appear to be very generously interested in helping me go "to the moon" etc. I've no idea how you're doing those things with crypto. I guess you have to go pretty far out of your way to buy, for example, airfare with a cryptocurrency or make otherwise really inconvenient trade-offs. I guess you might be semi-forced to use it due to, for example, living in a country with a currency which is more unpredictable than BTC then I think that's more of an black mark against the local currency than it is a feather in BTC's cap...

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#132

Post by Auracle »

dragontamer wrote: post #106
donatj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently? I went from living very comfortably to living paycheck-to-paycheck in about 6 months. Holding my value in USD has become a significant risk.

> Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently? Yeah, its up like 100% over Bitcoin and like +30% over Euro, Yen, and GBP? In fact, holding Cash/USD has been basically one of the best performing things in my entire portfolio this year (after oil/energy) Have _you_ seen BTC's buying power recently?

That all depends on the timeframe you’re looking at. The Bitcoin I bought (not nearly enough of) at under $80 is doing a lot better than any cash I still have from around then.

A year or two from now Bitcoin very well might be back above it’s all time high.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#133

Post by hailwren »

yuan43 wrote: post #120

The policy only ever made a little sense. What El Salvador desperately wants is a currency it can inflate to pay for the stuff it can not afford. In this regard, it is no different than any other country. What it had was a currency it does not print (US dollar) and for which there is an ongoing international shortage. What El Salvador got with Bitcoin was yet another currency it does not print and for which there is…

> Even so, this scheme only makes a little sense. A better approach might have been for the government to have set up a USD-based remittance program of its own.

This is just not true. Crypto as foreign remittance has been proven and is working quite well in Argentina.

What you really don't want as a layperson in Latin America, is for really any third party -- but especially government third parties, to have control of your money in any capacity during remittance.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#134

Post by smcl »

anonymouswacker wrote: post #105
smcl wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh there might be another bump. But as long as it's a space for scammers, pump-and-dump schemes, shitcoins and bullshitters it's just not for me. A pretty ridiculous amount of money has been sunk into making cryptocurrencies look like a big thing, instead of actually solving the problems that prevented people from actually using them. That makes me think that deep down the cryptocurrency people aren't that serious ab…

The "space" for a cryptocurrency is a Venn Diagram solely occupied by one circle: Bitcoin. We're seeing a culling of these shitcoin also-rans, which took the money from the late-coming naive while enriching the early wave of speculators, like any other common pyramid scheme.

Amazing. When the crypto world get bored of minting apes and such maybe they'll try to actually bother to try making bitcoin into something that can be used day-by-day. I don't think they will though. I think it'll remain only a speculative asset whose price jumps erratically to-and-fro until people get bored and move on to the next shiny thing.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#135

Post by Yizahi »

kranke155 wrote: post #109
frankenst1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth continued on second layers: Bitcoin's tx count on the Lightning Network has doubled over the last year. Forks of Bitcoin who attempted to scale by increasing the blocksize all failed and are practically dead (Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, eCash, Bitcoin ABC, ...).

Someone needs to explain to me how the Lightning Network actually works, because I find it super sus. How do people make money off transactions as miners if BTC transactions are so cheap ?

People must lock BTC in the "channels" from them to each of the peers they ever want to transact with, in the amount of what they will spend with them in the future. This should produce approximately 10billion*10billion channels in total (so 1^20 whateverellion channels for all humans). Then magic internet machine will solve this Traveler Salesman problem for each transaction.

After people realised that this is a crap idea, they have reinvented banks, who take people's BTC and give them IOUs instead. Then only banks have to deal with the "channels" and "locked" tokens in a centralised way, lessening the overall complexity.

Few understand :)

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#136

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

donatj wrote: post #27
croon wrote: post #11

It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. People who got rich from Bitcoin weren't savvy, they won the lottery. It's not a sound investment decision based on outcome. Investments are sound based on probability and risk beforehand. El Salvador gambled which is stupid. Whether they won or lost at the lottery is inconsequenti…

Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently? I went from living very comfortably to living paycheck-to-paycheck in about 6 months. Holding my value in USD has become a significant risk.

> Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently?

Yeah, it's been going up relative to almost all other currencies and especially BTC.

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#137

Post by thinkloop »

kranke155 wrote: post #109
frankenst1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth continued on second layers: Bitcoin's tx count on the Lightning Network has doubled over the last year. Forks of Bitcoin who attempted to scale by increasing the blocksize all failed and are practically dead (Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, eCash, Bitcoin ABC, ...).

Someone needs to explain to me how the Lightning Network actually works, because I find it super sus. How do people make money off transactions as miners if BTC transactions are so cheap ?

Are you asking how do lighting STAKERS make money if lightning transactions are so cheap? Right now they don't, people are doing it to bootstrap the network. But in the future, they will be able to make it on volume. Staking is nearly costless. There were 369 billion purchase transactions for goods and services worldwide in 2018 [1]. At a penny per, that's a lot of scratch.

[1] https://www.cardrates.com/advice/number-of-credit-card-trans...

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#138

Post by Yizahi »

kranke155 wrote: post #109
frankenst1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth continued on second layers: Bitcoin's tx count on the Lightning Network has doubled over the last year. Forks of Bitcoin who attempted to scale by increasing the blocksize all failed and are practically dead (Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, eCash, Bitcoin ABC, ...).

Someone needs to explain to me how the Lightning Network actually works, because I find it super sus. How do people make money off transactions as miners if BTC transactions are so cheap ?

More info about LN:

https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#139

Post by spywaregorilla »

hailwren wrote: post #133
yuan43 wrote: post #120

The policy only ever made a little sense. What El Salvador desperately wants is a currency it can inflate to pay for the stuff it can not afford. In this regard, it is no different than any other country. What it had was a currency it does not print (US dollar) and for which there is an ongoing international shortage. What El Salvador got with Bitcoin was yet another currency it does not print and for which there is…

> Even so, this scheme only makes a little sense. A better approach might have been for the government to have set up a USD-based remittance program of its own. This is just not true. Crypto as foreign remittance has been proven and is working quite well in Argentina. What you really don't want as a layperson in Latin America, is for really any third party -- but especially government third parties, to have control o…

you also, however, don't want your government to utterly collapse

Re: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure

#140

Post by cuteboy19 »

WHATDOESIT wrote: post #69
benj111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't do Forex trading but you are buying a currency backed by a government. My understanding is it's closely linked to interest rates.

So you're buying into trust of that government. With BTC you're buying into trust of the technology and other network participants. Is it really so different? I don't trust governments so much - my local currency is currently facing 25% YoY inflation. I bought Bitcoin.

It's much simpler. People want $ for £ for education tourism etc. Successful forex traders are just middlemen for these txns. The make sure that you can always sell $ even if there is no one to buy them at that exact moment.
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